I don't have a bit of valid information, but due to the time delay and lack of information coupled with the rumblings and constant message board and media chatter along with the shareprice action, I'm hopefully expecting a sale or a positive SA before the end of January. Think I'll hold off on January calls however. .. mo.. nic

Summary: Pegatron, maker of the CDMA iPhone 4s, is producing an “estimated” 15 million next-gen iPhones for Apple by September, according to DigiTimes.

DigiTimes is reporting Taiwanese laptop manufacturer Pegatron Technology (former maker of Asus notebooks) has received an order from Apple for an “estimated” 15 million next-gen iPhone to be ready for shipping by September, according to “sources from upstream component makers”.

It is unclear if Pegatron is being contracted to build the iPhone 4S or the iPhone 5, as some analysts believe Apple is pursuing a two-phone strategy, but as of last month it seemed unlikely that Apple would be able to produce multiple models all with the same September deadline.

This latest rumor from DigiTimes changes all that, especially if the anonymous source is correct that the new iPhone “does not seem to have any major update from iPhone 4,” which suggests Pegatron is making iPhone 4S, with another manufacturer (like Foxconn) possibly handling production for the iPhone 5. Or there could just be one phone from Apple this September, whatever its name.

After all, according to DigiTimes‘ July 1 report, Apple is only working on one iPhone and just added iPad 3 (rather than a second iPhone) to the production schedule, as reported by our friends at Between the Line.

Pegatron has worked with Apple before, as maker of the CDMA iPhone 4s back in 2010 (though less than four million units were shipped due to poor sales in the first quarter of 2011), so it is possible for the company to be on contract with Apple again. The question is just what exactly will Pegatron be making in its factories — will it be the iPhone 4S or the 5?

A court in Mannheim, Germany, ruled in February 2009 against HTC in a patent fight with IPCom, allowing an injunction against sales of HTC phones using UMTS technology and setting a penalty of up to 250,000 euros ($326,200) each time the injunction was contravened.

All HTC smartphones use UMTS technology.

In late November, a court in Karlsruhe, Germany, said the injunction against HTC smartphone sales in Germany could be enforced after HTC dropped an appeal.

IPCom said in a statement on Thursday that it sent 100 retailers cease and desist requests on December 6, asking them to stop selling HTC's 3G handsets by December 20.

"Since this deadline has passed without any of the retailers complying, IPCom has sued them for infringement of patent #100A themselves," IPCom said, adding so far it has sued around 30 retailers.

The legal battle could cost HTC millions of euros and hurt its relations with retailers in one of its key markets.

The company sells around 2 million smartphones a year in Germany, some 4-5 percent of the group's total, according to research firm IDC.

"This poses another challenge for HTC in managing confidence of key distribution partners -- a further reminder of the destabilization effect patent claims threaten to exert on the industry in 2012," said Geoff Blaber, analyst at research firm CCS Insight.

HTC was not immediately available to comment.

It has said the battle would have no impact on its business in Germany because the injunction covered only one HTC handset - which is no longer sold in Germany - and it has also modified its implementation of the UMTS standards.

The ruling does not mention any particular model.

Earlier this week HTC lost a patent case against Apple in the United States, the market generating half of its revenues, but HTC said that it could soon replace phones with the disputed technology with new models.

IPCom acquired Bosch's mobile telephony patent portfolio, created between the mid-1980s and 2000, which includes about 160 patent families worldwide, including some of the key patents in the wireless industry, such as patent 100, which standardizes a cellphone's first connection to a network.

Several of the top phone makers have signed a licensing deal with it, but HTC and Nokia have challenged IPCom's technology patents in courts across Europe.

IPCom said by continuing to use its patents without paying a fair compensation IPCom could in the future legally refuse HTC a license for its standard-essential patents.

Bad products, horrible software and no cohesive vision have seemingly turned Research In Motion into a company without motion at this point. Throw in a huge delay before BlackBerry 10 smartphones start shipping, and it’s clear why people are losing, or have lost, faith in a company that played a tremendous role in making the smartphone industry what it is today. Thanks to one of our most trusted sources, BGR now has new information on what’s going on inside Research In Motion, and the picture it paints isn’t a pretty one.

Our source has communicated to us in no uncertain terms that the PlayBook 2.0 OS developers have been testing is a crystal clear window into the current state of BlackBerry 10 on smartphones. No email, no BlackBerry Messenger — it’s almost identical. “Email and PIM [is better] on an 8700 than it is on BlackBerry 10,” our contact said while talking to us about RIM’s failure to make the company’s new OS work with the network infrastructure RIM is known for.

We also have some more background on why RIM’s BlackBerry 10 smartphones are delayed, and it has nothing to do with a new LTE chipset that RIM is waiting on. In what is something of a serious allegation, our source told us that Mike Lazaridis was lying when he said the company’s new lineup was delayed for that reason. ”RIM is simply pushing this out as long as they can for one reason, they don’t have a working product yet,” we were told.

At the end of our conversation, our source communicated something shocking for a high-level RIM employee to say. He told us that RIM is betting its business on a platform and ecosystem that isn’t even as good as iPhone OS 1.0 or Android 2.0. “There’s no room for a fourth ecosystem,” he stated, “and DingleBerry also works on BlackBerry 10.”bgr.com

Google continues to be embroiled in patent litigation. Oracle has sued Google, while Microsoft and Apple have either sued or threatened to sue companies that make devices that run Google's Android and Chrome operating systems. Google has largely struggled to combat the challenges, leading the company's chief legal officer, David Drummond, to blog about "a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents."

Whether Android infringes on patents will ultimately be decided by the courts. But the biggest challenge for Google is that it's put itself in the vulnerable position of having a relatively tiny patent portfolio with which to defend itself. That's because, in intellectually property litigation, a company with a patent threatens to sue, or actually sues, another company that it believes has infringed on its innovation. The common defense is for the accused company to find one of its own patents that the accusing company has infringed upon and threaten a countersuit. That gives it the ammunition to propose cross-licensing deals that keep both companies out of court.

Google's thin patent portfolio has made it a bigger target. That's one key reason, Google Chief Executive Larry Page said, why the Web giant is purchasing Motorola Mobility. Sure, the company is a key Android customer. But it's also a huge holder of mobile-device patents, something that should help Google protect itself against future litigation. Google will likely continue to acquire patents in the new year to bolster its defenses.

(My comments regarding this article.. ***** Note the Interdigital mention in last paragraph*****)

By Anders Bylund December 27, 2011

Wireless security researcher VirnetX (AMEX: VHC ) is perhaps the most polarizing stock on the market. Some investors love it for the promise of owning patents in the LTE 4G security space. Others wonder if the patents are as important as VirnetX wants them to be. From the latter point of view, the stock looks tremendously expensive.

Where will the company go in 2012? Let's figure it out together.

The promise It's easy to see the attraction here. VirnetX is an offshoot of defense contractor SAIC (NYSE: SAI ) . Like Athena of Greek myth, it sprang into existence fully armed with a cache of security-related patents acquired from SAIC.

The company burst onto the computing scene with a big patent infringement win against Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT ) . Mr. Softy lost a jury trial and was ordered to pay $106 million in damages, but decided to fight on, and eventually settled the case for $200 million.

Of the settlement, 35% belongs to SAIC, according to the original license agreement. It was a very expensive campaign to wage, costing more than $40 million in legal fees. But everything worked out: the legal battle paid off, and VirnetX investors enjoyed a $23.6 million special dividend the next quarter. That's $0.50 per share for a meaty 8.4% payout.

If VirnetX can pull off that trick again, or else start licensing 4G security patents to every player in the mobile industry, investors will be very, very happy. And VirnetX is trying hard. There's one lawsuit involving six patents against networking giant Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO ) and iStuff maker Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL ) . VirnetX has also declared several of its patents "essential" to various 4G mobile standards.

Where's the payoff? So many irons in the fire and so much promise, and yet 24% of the float is sold short. Shares are trading some 36% below 52-week highs. Why aren't we all backing up the truck to these seemingly outsized returns?

Because there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, my friend. In order to cash in those chips, VirnetX must prove that its technology is indeed both innovative and important. And that might not be the slam-dunk that the Microsoft case implied.

For one, those "essential technology" claims are VirnetX's own. The relevant standards bodies have not, to the best of my knowledge, acknowledged or approved of any of them. That's like your Uncle Dennis declaring that his air guitar skills are essential to saving the economy. Might be true, but you just don't know. The technologies could be perfectly valid solutions to 4G security challenges, but network and phone builders might be able to design around them with totally different technologies.

As for the Microsoft case, it seems obvious that Redmond could have settled for much less -- or perhaps won outright with the right strategy. For one, paying nearly double the original damage award doesn't speak highly of Mr. Softy's performance in this case. For another, one of the patents (the '759 patent) from that proceeding has since been invalidated by a challenge from Cisco. Microsoft paid for that now-worthless patent.

Cisco has since lost another challenge of VirnetX patents. Maybe VirnetX has a legal leg to stand on after all. But it's hardly the bulked-up hunk of meat it looked like in 2010.

So in 2012, I not-so-bravely predict that VirnetX will win some battles and lose a few others -- the fickle fates of justice swing both ways. But there will also be an explosion of competing solutions developed by hardware and software giants with plenty of skin in the mobile game.

In the end, VirnetX goes home with a much smaller paycheck than earlier victories have indicated, and investors are left holding an empty bag. The current $1.35 billion market cap is just not appropriate for a development-stage company with minuscule proven sales and a highly uncertain future.

Shares in InterDigital have fallen nearly 39 percent over the past six months.InterDigital plans to announce Monday that it has called off a sales process for its patent portfolio, months after the wireless technology company put its holdings up for auction, people briefed on the matter told DealBook.

The decision by InterDigital followed months of talks with several prospective buyers, following a surge of interest by tech companies in buying up patents. But InterDigital was unable to fetch an offer for the entire portfolio of 20,000 patents, one of these people said.

That portfolio included patents that covered wireless data technology used in smartphones, including the iPhone and various Android devices. InterDigital had sought at least $3 billion for the collection, this person said. They have generated more than $3 billion in revenue through last year.

The market had held talks with potential buyers, which have included the likes of Intel and Samsung, as recently as this past weekend, this person said. But the bids from suitors, some of whom had teamed up, came in below expectations.

InterDigital and its advisers ultimately decided that the company was better served by ending the auction and focusing on selling off pieces of the portfolio, this person said. Any such deals are still weeks away from completion, however, and those transactions are likely to fetch only low hundreds of millions of dollars at most.

At the same time, the company will seek to strike cross-licensing arrangements for those patents, this person added. That process had also been held up by the sales process, as potential partners awaited the fate of those patents.

As InterDigital collects proceeds from patent sales or licensing agreements, the company may turn around and buy additional patents for newer wireless technologies, this person said.

InterDigital said last summer that it had hired Evercore Partners and BarclaysCapital to run a sale of the patents, hoping to seize upon growing interest in intellectual property. Last July, the bankrupt Nortel Networks sold more than 6,000 patents to a group led by Apple Inc. and Microsoft for $4.5 billion in cash. And in August, Google agreed to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in large part for the phone maker’s horde of patents.

The Motorola deal was in some ways bad news for InterDigital, however. It removed Google as a potential bidder, limiting the impetus for other players to bid up for the InterDigital patents, this person said. And unlike Nortel, whose asset sale had a specific timetable imposed by the bankruptcy process, InterDigital could not wield the cudgel of a hard deadline against potential buyers.

Shares in InterDigital were down 2.9 percent in late afternoon trading on Monday, at $44.63. They have fallen nearly 39 percent over the past six months, as investors grew pessimistic about the chances of a patent sale. As of Monday afternoon, the company had a market value of about $2 billion.